15th November 2010 Archive

There is no such thing as the last laugh in the server chip business. But you can get the next laugh, and Advanced Micro Devices thinks it is going to get that sequential chuckle on rival Intel in the x64 server racket with next year's launch of the "Bulldozer" family of Opteron processors.

If you want to sell supercomputers these days, you need to have a GPU story to tell. And Big Blue has been telling a story about a blade server for GPUs for the past several months, but unfortunately it doesn't actually have the product ready.

With USB 3 storage now gathering momentum, fitting a SuperSpeed interface to your computer seems like an option worth investing in now. Even laptop users aren’t left out of this buss ride, if there’s an ExpressCard 34 slot available. Such cards are still quite a rarity, with Buffalo’s IFC-EC2U3UC dual-port adapter being among the few on offer.

VMware's ESX Server virtualization and Amazon's EC2 cloud got their starts among developers frustrated with the time and money it took to get physical infrastructure approved and set up so they could monkey around with their code. And it is a safe bet to guess that hybrid CPU-GPU clusters are going to get some serious action now that Amazon has plugged in Nvidia's GPU co-processors into its Cluster Compute instances.

An online protest campaign is urging air travellers in the USA to observe "national opt out day" on 24 November and insist on their right to be felt up by Transportation Security Administration (TSA) operatives rather than submit to the new nudie perv scanner technology.

Facebook may be about to launch what some have perhaps over-excitedly described as the headline-grabbing “Gmail killer”, but it will do so without the help of Google alumnus and FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit.

One of the technologies that has been on a steadily accelerating price/performance curve is face recognition technology. A series of talks this year demonstrated just how quickly the software is improving.

Brocade is ready to deliver 10gig Ethernet switching with end-to-end Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), opening the way for its customers to move away from costly physical Fibre Channel and embrace converged networking with Ethernet economics.

The pictures say it all, really. Hardware hacker Charles Mangin this weekend posted the results of his attempt to slot the innards from a USB Flash drive into an old 3.5in floppy disk case - well, two of them, to be precise, the original casing not being quite thick enough for the cable and connector.

One of the main limiting factors on a manned mission to Mars is the fact that, under normal assumptions, much of the stuff that travelled to the red planet would not be concerned with exploration but rather with bringing the crew back to Earth.

If Silicon Graphics was still a standalone company and had not been eaten by hyperscale server maker Rackable Systems, there is a fairly good chance that the innovative "Project Mojo" hybrid CPU-GPU clusters, which pack a petaflops into a single cabinet, would not have seen the light of day.

Security researchers have found an important missing piece in the Stuxnet jigsaw that provides evidence that the malware was targeted at the types of control systems more commonly found in nuclear plants and other specialised operations than in mainstream factory controls.

Nokia's C7 handset can read NFC (Near Field Communication) tags, and operate as an NFC tag itself, with a downloaded update coming next year. This will be followed by software to drive the secure element.

Blogging site Tumblr was knocked offline on Monday by the denizens of 4Chan, which was briefly floored itself during a tit-for-tat dispute that has recently escalated into open hacking attacks by both sides.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has demonstrated a mystery Android phone that uses a near field communication (NFC) chip that could effectively turn the handset into a credit card, offering the ability to "tap and pay."